


Wake you only to pleasure

by acaramelmacchiato



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Multi, Musichetta is a famous soprano, Romantic Bossuet is the Bossuet you have to fear, Sorry Donizetti, amis so shenanigans, especially sorry to you Wordsworth, ladies: are they symbols?, ménage à trois OBVIOUSLY, reference to a Certain Event in 1832, sorry Cherubini, sorry Meyerbeer, that shouldn't have to be AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 05:56:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaramelmacchiato/pseuds/acaramelmacchiato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I am enchanted with you,” said Bossuet, and these words, not chosen well, were spoken with the grace of someone falling down the stairs trying to put pants on. </p><p>(For the kinkmeme, prompt is: Canon-era AU where Musichetta is a famous soprano and Joly and Bossuet catch her eye when they come to the opera together.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wake you only to pleasure

He knew her first as Noraïme. She stepped on the stage and he saw her through a wafting exhalation of smoke from the gentleman in the seat before him. Her hair was loose and therefore wild. It was decorated with gold. As the smoke rose, so did her gaze, and Bossuet froze in his seat.   
  
Joly nudged him with an elbow and lifted an eyebrow.  
  
Her eyes were on him, brutally dark and hot like coals taken from a fire. Her voice carried on, sweet and intricate; conversational. This charming contrast of hot and cold seemed to create and describe her.  
  
“Her name,” he told Joly as they left, “is Musichetta.”  
  
“Noraïme? Yes, _la Musichetta_ , it’s certainly what she calls herself.”  
  
“Seeing her has given me Stendhal’s syndrome. I can’t see straight. My heart races. If I fall over, what say you to carrying me home?”  
  
“Stendhal’s syndrome isn’t real,” said Joly, without irony or self-awareness.   
  
“I must be fainting, I am hearing my friend Joly deny the existence of -- and therefore his own proximity to! -- a very serious condition. I feel cold, I cannot breathe, oh --”  
  
“It’s about as real as Werther syndrome. I’m a medical student, you know, not a mystic or stupid. She came from the Conservatoire like everyone else, she is quite human,” said Joly. And then, to needle him or discern if he was paying attention, added: “It’s said she is close with Prévost. Perhaps he could introduce you.”  
  
“Prévost!” exclaimed Bossuet, who had been at school a bit ahead of the year’s prix de Rome honoree, and hated him. “I’d lie in front of a horse-cart before I asked Prévost the time, let alone -- !”  
  
“I pray you don’t find yourself in Rome without a pocket watch,” said Joly, and tapped at Bossuet’s knees with his cane to trip him. Bossuet snatched the cane out of his hands retributively, and began to spin it in circles.   
  
The streets were loud, and the weather cold after a warm day, and his heartbeat calmed so he no longer felt it. The world returned to its usual appearance, but when he blinked he still saw the afterimage of her eyes.

 

* * *

 

Their friends had not enjoyed the new incarnation of  _Les Abencérages_ , and when Bossuet told them how he had spent the evening, they began to air their opinions.   
  
Courfeyrac had been at the opening, in the box of a beautiful marchioness. The performance had moved him to such boredom that, he reported, he had spent all his money on wine and eventually fell asleep at the lady’s side, and he was considerably disgraced:  
  
“I begin to suspect I am tone-deaf,” he confided.   
  
“You might be,” said Joly. “You might dislike music. You might dislike Cherubini. All things are possible. The latter is even probable.”  
  
“For my part I am cheerfully indifferent to Cherubini,” said Bossuet, and a few people interjected that indifference was not acceptable. He spoke over them: “But I am passionate about music. Never more so, now that I have seen  _la Musichetta_ , met her eyes across the gallery.”  
  
“She has talent. But can’t overcome what she sings! No voice can disguise that the work is a confection, base and decorative, or that although Cherubini is beneath the Théâtre de l’Opéra, he is clearly quite the right color on the ‘ _Académie Royale de Musique,_ ’” said Prouvaire, entering the conversation as he usually did,  _punta supramano_.   
  
“I beg you,” said Bossuet. “Not to wander far from the point. It is this: I have been struck down by love. I must speak with her. But how? Come, one of you must have a plan, a solution, an idea, a set of climbing spikes, or a disguise.”  
  
Joly laughed. “Where would you be infiltrating? She doesn’t live at the opera.”  
  
Bahorel said: “I can get you a disguise,” but did not elaborate.  
  
“And anyway,” said Courfeyrac. “Prouvaire is a good friend of hers, aren’t you, Jehan?”  
  
Prouvaire shrugged, still not willing to let Cherubini go with so little insult. “She has literary tastes. I see her at an occasional --” he waved a hand vaguely, encompassing anything from an occasional salon to an occasional orgy.   
  
“And you weren’t going to tell me?” Bossuet asked, in a quieter voice to limit the conversation to two people.  
  
“I do not keep track of your friends,” said Prouvaire, looking at Bossuet, and then looking at the ground, probably thinking of apologizing.   
  
“None of my friends are new-fallen angels -- are muses -- are sirens -- none of my friends are so beautiful, or so beguiling,” Bossuet felt his voice rise, (at the same time Courfeyrac was calling out, “Make these judgments more gently, Grantaire here is in tears,”) and said: “I  _told you about her_ , Prouvaire, the heat in her gaze -- her voice like -- a meaningful sorbet --”  
  
“ _A meaningful sorbet_ ,” Prouvaire repeated, his eyes widening with horror.   
  
Grantaire was the first to actually laugh, and then there was no stopping any of them.

 

* * *

 

In the end, Prouvaire was moved to pity and took Bossuet with him to the parlor where he often saw Musichetta. The talk was more poetry than literature. Many there were translators. A few were librettists, and they sought Musichetta’s advice which she denied them, saying she did not know enough on the subject.   
  
Bossuet felt the Stendhal syndrome again when he came up to greet her, while Prouvaire said, “ _Madamina_ , meet my dear friend,” with a playful smile that she shared -- they were better friends than he’d implied, Bossuet thought briefly. And then he became stupid:  
  
She wore a dress that was either gray or pink without real fidelity to either; the warm and discreet color of a turtledove, with a froth of white  _point d’Alençon_  whispering on the floor. Her black openwork gloves exposed her fingers, tipped with gleaming pink nails and always held in a graceful and unconscious attitude, like she was thinking of some action or caress -- holding a silk ribbon, or taking a strawberry from a bowl.   
  
Bossuet looked up, and wished he could look back at the floor.   
  
Her dark hair had been pressed and parted, looped in plaits at the back and curling at the sides of her face, carefully done but providing the impression that chaos was only a minute away. The  _ferroniere_  that dipped to a point on her forehead was a gold chain like a thread.  
  
Her eyes met his directly, large and shadowed, frank and secretive, eyes like a fortune teller who saw an exciting future for him. Her cheek was so like a peach that he could have bitten it. Her lips were red, and she was laughing at him. He looked at the floor, and her slippers were red as well.   
  
He looked safely at his own gloves, and finally Prouvaire manhandled him out of danger.   
  
“What’s the matter with you,” he hissed tautly, dragging Bossuet over to a wall and propping him up on it. “I hadn’t told anyone that my friend was an idiot because I didn’t think you  _were_ , but obviously I’m wrong and you are. We should leave, don’t speak to anyone and eventually you’ll be forgotten,” he seemed finished, but in fact had only needed to draw a breath. He went on: “Staring for half an hour like a provincial! And you from Meaux. You realize you did not actually say anything, not a word; the mortifying silence dragged on.”   
  
“Were there pearls in her hair?” Bossuet asked him, having ridden out the lecture without hearing any of the specific words.   
  
Prouvaire took him by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes. “Bossuet. Lesgles. My friend; my brother, I cannot discuss this any longer. Goodnight!”  
  
He put his hat on and left, and Bossuet remained in some surprise leaning against the wall.

 

 

 

 

A moment later, Musichetta was there as well, mimicking his posture and looking up at him, her laugh diminished to a smile. He had seen her on the stage, stared at her like someone mapping constellations. 

Now she was so close beside him that he could almost feel the coolness of silk and the heat of her skin. 

There were, in fact, pearls in her hair. 

Her brows and her eyelashes made her eyes glitter from shadows. 

“Well,” she said. “We never did make it to saying that we were pleased to meet one another. So. I am.”

“I am enchanted with you,” said Bossuet, and these words, not chosen well, were spoken with the grace of someone falling down the stairs trying to put pants on. 

“Enchanted with  _something_ , but you do not even know me,” she said, and smiled again. “I saw you at the opera, didn’t I?”

“ _Les Abencérages_ ,” said Bossuet.

“Yes,” she said, and might have winked. “I do know it. After all I perform it. You know they were going to have  _L’esule di Granata_? Three years ago, but it fell through. I would have preferred to be Azema to Noraïme. It’s rude to criticize these choices, forgive me. And anyway three years ago we didn’t have Véron, so now it’s never going to happen.”

Her speaking voice had a pleasant low tone that he hadn’t thought would come from such an effortless and precise soprano. It was engaging and a bit quiet; it encouraged him to lean in, and he realized with a start that he liked what she was saying. 

The warmth and openness of her teasing reminded him of the way he spoke to his own friends -- how they spoke to him. Very unlike the speech of an angel, of perfection, of a muse. 

“You prefer to sing Meyerbeer?” he asked, without thinking to impress her but because he was interested. 

“I prefer to play characters of Meyerbeer’s,” she said, holding up a finger. “There is a difference.”

“You don’t prefer Italians?”

“I  _prefer_  the French, will this interview be published?” she said, and he laughed.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be so curious. But I am, despite myself.”

“So you are. So am I! Let us inverse the interview. What is your name?”

“It is a matter of some debate,” said he. “My name is Lesgles, I am of Meaux, I am called Bossuet, I am called L’Aigle, I answer to all.”

She looked surprised. “I answer only to Musichetta, and then only half the time.”

“That is very efficient.  _Madamina_.”

She laughed.

“You had a friend with you,” she said, voice gentler.

“Prouvaire?”

“No, not Jehan, I mean when I saw you at the Salle le Peletier. There was absolutely a friend. I think he may have been furnished with a walking stick. He was telling you jokes, and you were discouraging him.”

“Joly?”

She shrugged, the silk moved, her hair bounced. “You shouldn’t ask me,” she said.

 

* * *

It took only weeks for her to meet Joly, and there followed a tense period when he thought his roommate would steal her away entirely. Finally she announced that they were both dear to her, but there were only so many hours in a day -- they were friends anyhow, certainly they could find an efficient and elegant solution? 

 After several weeks working out the elegance of their solution, Joly and Bossuet were in the  _salon de la danse_  with Musichetta, laughing at her jokes about the dancers and drinking dry champagne. She pointed out the Taglionis and identified patrons in her quiet, teasing voice.  
  
“You know,” she said. “One hears the most terrific stories of what goes on here. Patrons, dancers, champagne, the eve of a performance -- the math completes itself.”  
  
“No, I’m sorry but it doesn’t,” said Joly, and numbered the list on his fingers: “Patrons, dancers, dry champagne, the eve of the performance; is the answer  _four_?”   
  
Musichetta tugged his cravat so he leaned in, and she spoke quietly in his ear precisely what she had meant.   
  
“So the answer is not four,” said Joly, with some strain in his voice.  
  
“Fewer than,” she said. “It is three.”  
  
Bossuet took his pocket watch from his waistcoat and regarded it closely. “We have something like an hour before Musichetta becomes Noraïme for the last time,” he announced.   
  
Joly raised his glass. “To the end of Noraïme,” he said.   
  
Musichetta drank from Bossuet’s, and then put her hands on both of their knees. “Let us not commemorate the end of Noraïme. I don’t care the least for Noraïme. Have I told you I am engaged by Meyerbeer for the role of Alice in  _Robert le Diable_? Let us drink instead to the promise that we shall have many more long evenings in the this foyer, and to Joly’s miserable mathematical accomplishments.”  
  
“Meyerbeer!” said Bossuet. “You are quite a loyal fan.”  
  
Musichetta rolled her eyes. “Yes, you have found me out, I am the secret lover of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is twice my age and lives in Berlin with his wife, for he, you understand, has hair.”   
  
“I said nothing.”  
  
Joly corrected him. “You said, ‘Meyerbeer! You are quite a loyal fan,’ and you said it very jealously.”  
  
The truth was that Bossuet considered Musichetta’s affection a stroke of genuine luck, and therefore a mistake awaiting correction.   
  
So he was constantly vigilant of the ways his happiness could evaporate. He listed them once: She could run away with Joly, she could run away with Meyerbeer, she could be seduced by any number of handsome tenors, she could be seduced by any number of compelling baritones, she could be seduced by innumerable combinations of handsome tenors working together with compelling baritones. She could leave Paris. He could leave Paris, likely by accident.   
  
They’d been walking along the quai d’Austerlitz, and Musichetta had threatened to beat him with Joly’s cane. She came to the point where it was actually poised above his head, and then Joly had disarmed her.   
  
  
They became experts at negotiating the first lady’s dressing room, in the way sailors become experts at accomplishing their business aboard moving ships. They knew where to put the chairs and exactly how far to one side Joly had to stand in order to avoid knocking the rosewater jar from the table.   
  
One night, an anonymous melomane (they all suspected it might have been Bahorel) gifted her with a small parrot which existed in a constant state of bewilderment -- punctuated only by moral outrage when the three of them were together. They learned that if they put a blanket over its cage it fell asleep.   
  
Eventually this entire process -- moving the chairs, tucking the rosewater bottle in from the edge, lulling the parrot to sleep with the artificial night of the blanket, and a sparing and economical renegotiation of clothing -- was clocked at four minutes. It required coordinated participation and no error.

* * *

Bossuet remembered when he first saw her; Noraïme, with eyes like a fortune teller, the right moment between hot and cold, and he rebuked himself.   
  
“I’ve been very unfair to you,” he said, one evening.   
  
“You have hair,” she guessed, “but you keep it hidden?”  
  
“Worse.”  
  
“Worse!”  
  
“I think I’ve behaved badly toward you, I’ve thought of you symbolically. Beauty, mystery, contradiction, inspiration, fear. All of those things I associate with your name and your image, and this is shameful.”   
  
She frowned. “And you are aware that I exist in reality?”  
  
“I am, and still for so many months I looked at you like a critic, when the truth is, when I am not thinking, Musichetta, she is the hottest and most remote star, she is intangible, she is perfect -- I think that your happiness concerns me not because I like to see you happy, though I do, but because it is my own happiness. I remain in love with you, to be sure, but I also simply love you. To summarize, when I am not writing some pompous poetry in my head about my mistress I am thinking that you are my friend, Musichetta, together with Joly, you are my dearest friends,” saying this, he reflected, and added: “Perhaps you more than Joly, since as you’ve seen he is also my landlord, which makes him petty.”  
  
She had put her head so her cheek rested on his shoulder, and when she smiled at him he felt the movement through his shirt. He knew that smile, glittering, indescribable -- he stopped the thought. She smiled at him, he knew without seeing it, and it made him happy.   
  
“Well,” she said, “what an odd little declaration, if you mean you love me I’d better write to Meyerbeer tomorrow and tell him I regret it, but the elopement’s off.”  
  
At that moment the door opened and admitted Joly, tired and expressionless from a day of practical observation. He raised his eyebrows at the two of them and asked if they were plotting.   
  
Musichetta yawned, beckoned him over, and started to unwind his cravat. “Yes,” she replied. “Your death will be very complicated. It will only work if we’ve calculated the physics exactly right. And then we will run off with all your worldly possessions, being, a walking stick, this necktie, and whatever is in your wallet. We have horses waiting under the window. No, L’Aigle was apologizing to me for considering me to be intangible, and we have declared friendship to one another. The effect is this: We will be calling you from now  _la Musichetta_ , and I am to be Joly, and consequently you will have to practice quite a few soprano parts to keep the name up to snuff.”  
  
Joly put a hand fondly on the top of her head, and sat beside them.   
  
“Friendship,” he said. “What a harmonious outcome, isn’t it that, ‘ _Ohne diese Sympathie ist kein Glück auf Erden_?’ And men dressed as parrots are almost never wrong.”   
  
“I think he means  _agape_ , more than the specific devotion of friendship,” said Musichetta, teasing.  
  
“With a touch of eros,” Bossuet reminded her. “I used to wonder what would happen if we were ever parted, now I think that it isn’t possible.”  
  
“Don’t speak too optimistically,” said Joly, “if you plan to keep drinking the water.”  
  
“There is only one thing which parts everyone. This is death. It poses certain questions. How shall it happen? When? Under what circumstances? These questions do not concern me, for love is infinite, and it is shadowed only by a sleep and a forgetting, as Wordsworth writes of what precedes our lives. The remaining question: How, afterwards, shall we know each other? And again this does not concern me. For every morning since I can remember, I have reached by instinct, looking for someone beside me, and in this blundering fashion I have been once successful -- this is enough to say I will be always successful.”  
  
Musichetta was helping Joly navigate his way under her skirt, and they had both stopped listening to him. He laughed, and hit Joly on the back of the head, and proceeded to heckle them.

 

* * *

 

 _LA MUSICHETTA È RITORNA_ , declared the billboard at La Scala’s first foyer. It had been said already in the papers, had evoked comment, criticism, speculation.   
  
If she hadn’t been killed in an émeute a year ago, where had she been? Resting, in America, in Algeria, in Germany with Meyerbeer? The list went on; it was edited and perfected in Milanese drawing rooms and had rather blown over in the Parisian ones.   
  
The day after Christmas, in the year 1833, she sang Lucrezia Borgia for the first time. She set the standard, said the critics. She was wild and vengeful and innocent, they said; it was an achievement, from the loggione there was only applause. Her voice was better than it had ever been in Paris. The girlishness and studiousness that had been implied when it was called cold and exact had gone. The tone was darker and it resounded with passion.   
  
At a certain point during the aria “Com'è bello,” the papers reported, the opera house and casino went quiet:  
  
 _La Musichetta is better than before. She is divine, her voice has aged in an oak barrel; she expresses at all moments a limitless capacity for feeling. At a certain point Lucrezia is obliged to sing to the sleeping youth Gennaro. What affection, and what sadness! She kneels beside him, she lays her fingers on his closed eyes and caresses his cheek. As she does these things, in her clear, effortless voice, half dolorous and half in hope, she promises to keep watch alone. Even the gamblers were silent!_

**Author's Note:**

> Woo not a ton of notes here except WHY WAS THIS SO HARD TO WRITE.
> 
> **I just reread this and wait this is a shitload of notes, who do I think I am? Maybe I meant "not a lot of things I need to cite." 
> 
> 1\. Title from Lucrezia Borgia, the Aria in Question, "May joy and delight and a guardian angel wake you only to pleasure! Ah! Sad night and bitter watch must I keep alone." And wow this stretched my Titles Only in English policy because it is not like super recognizable. If at all. 
> 
> 2\. "...a wafting exhalation of smoke from the gentleman" it is very important to me that you recognize that this gentleman is Vautrin. I cut anything that would identify him. But. It's him. Please believe me. 
> 
> 3\. I have no evidence that Les Abencérages was performed in 1831, but I needed something by Cherubini so everyone could freak out about how much they hate him. In my head Prouvaire and Berlioz are kind of bros. That didn't make it into the story. These notes are useless my god. 
> 
> 4\. Eugène Prévost was the winner of the Prix de Rome in 1831. He's from Paris. Seems like an okay guy but I don't know Bossuet's life.
> 
> 5\. The company at the Paris Opera was called the Théâtre de l’Opéra between August 4th and August 10th, 1830 (oh no Hugo I mentioned 1830 w/r/t the amis -- do I get fined??) so like Prouvaire look at your choices about what to get mad about.
> 
> 6\. The production of L’esule di Granata in question was sposed to be in 1828 sorry Meyerbeer hope you weren't sad
> 
> 7\. The Taglionis were def both in town for Robert le Diable in November of 1831 so I'm okay saying they were there in spring?
> 
> 8\. JOLY WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW HE HAS SEEN THE MAGIC FLUTE.
> 
> 9\. Lucrezia Borgia is a really shitty choice here considering Hugo sued the librettist the second they tried to schedule a performance in Paris but COME AT ME HUGO I needed something that was not too to-the-point, and premiered at La Scala in 1833 so come at me let's do this
> 
> 10\. (Exits left, herping)


End file.
